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Cycling To Work Can Cut Cancer and Heart Disease (bbc.com)
randomErr quotes a report from BBC: Want to live longer? Reduce your risk of cancer? And heart disease? Then cycle to work, say scientists. The five-year study of 250,000 UK commuters also showed walking had some benefits over sitting on public transport or taking the car. Published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) today, the University of Glasgow study compared those who had an "active" commute with those who were mostly stationary. Overall, 2,430 of those studied died, 3,748 were diagnosed with cancer and 1,110 had heart problems. But, during the course of the study, regular cycling cut the risk of death from any cause by 41%, the incidence of cancer by 45% and heart disease by 46%. The cyclists clocked an average of 30 miles per week, but the further they cycled the greater the health boon. However, the effect was still there even after adjusting the statistics to remove the effects of other potential explanations like smoking, diet or how heavy people are.
news at 11, exercise leads to better health
now take your bike and shove it up your ass, my work is 30 miles away, its fucking hot in my part of the world and there are a lot of hills
ANY?
regular cycling cut the risk of death from any cause by 41%
I would have thought it would increase your risk of death by being hit by a car.
In all seriousness though, people are not really designed for the type of lifestyle we live today in the modern world. We weren't meant to sit all day long and stare at a monitor. It would be interesting to know what cycling to and from work does in regards to stress relief too.
Bike to work is healthy and back to home might be dangerous if you get late according to my wife's rules.
...cycling on the street at rush hour time just to be run over and die by some asshole driving while looking at his / her cellphone (almost happened to me). So much for health benefits cycling to work...
....while raising your risk of being killed by a car 700%!
It would be a lot easier if cagers weren't so fucking stupid and inconsiderate assholes. It's friday, so just go to youtube and you can see a million examples of what I'm talking about.
heart disease I'd die within 5 years from getting hit by a car or mugged/shot biking through the worst parts of the city. I think I'll take my chances with cancer unless I move somewhere that's safer for biking.
People not in good health weren't riding a bike to work in the first place. I'm currently paying over twice as much per month for rent to live near where I work in Bellevue, WA since I'm no longer healthy enough to bike to work.
There is exactly one death per person. No one lives forever.
Get used to the idea, you ARE going to die so enjoy what you have, make other peoples lives better, and share your time with friends and family.
If it takes you less than 2 hours to bike to work and you can avoid the freeway then sure. I'll just do my biking after work thanks.
I would still question the causality here.
People with weak hearts tend not to want to cycle for obvious reasons. For people with stage 1 cancer, the only symptoms might be that they don't really feel up to cycling to work.
I understand you think Elkim Roa might be hen-pecked. But if he* tells his wife to go screw herself, and she takes that as a hint to discover vibrating massagers, he might not get any for a while.
* More likely
Moving closer doesn't help if it is part of your job description to visit clients' land or haul more work equipment than will fit in a reasonable bike trailer.
>"Cycling To Work Can Cut Cancer and Heart Disease"
Nope, that is not the article. Look at the title of the paper:
"Association between active commuting and incident cardiovascular disease, cancer, and mortality: prospective cohort study"
*ASSOCIATION*, which is another way of saying correlation. It is not a study of causality. This proves nothing. Perhaps people who bike to work also eat better. Perhaps they have more income. Perhaps the other parts of their life have lower stress. They can't possibly eliminate ALL other possibilities by "adjusting for" because those are just assumptions.
Of course, it is common sense that exercising regularly will cut your chance of heart disease and possibly cancer. But the title of the posting implies there is causality where that is not proven in the article.
By the way, I bicycle to work almost every day.... but it is only like 2/3 of a mile round trip :)
I'm pretty sure the lungfuls of car exhaust will counteract that benefit. Hell, I knew a truck driver who had his chest cracked open looking for problems only to find it was just the build up of decades of soot from sitting in traffic so much.
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I have a friend who has no car in a city without much transit - bikes everywhere he needs to go. Despite pushing seventy years of age, he is in top physical condition.
Except that roughly every five years he gets nailed by some clueless driver wandering into the bike lane, pulling out of a mall entrance, or running a light. On each occasion, the medics have had to reassemble him from traces of DNA found at the accident scene. Somehow he survives, and after a few months in the hospital gets back on a bike again. It's fortunate that he never flies, because by now his body is mostly pins and braces.
There is no way you will get me on one of those things.
No.
CAPTCHA: bloody
That seems highly unlikely. No one suffers repeated catastrophic accidents that require months of hospital care, much less over decades while continuing the same behavior.
Keep making up stories to make yourself feel better about your laziness.
Here in Maryland you might reduce your risk of cancer and heart disease while increasing the absolute certainty of being run over by a jackass "driving" a car.
I'll just continue drinking myself to death, thanks.
the cars driving like maniacs. Do the drivers in your city drift into the bike lane while making right turns too?
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Folks with superior natural immunity to heart-attack and cancer express an un-natural affection for spinning rubber wheels and leather bicycle seats. Just so happens ..... might as well have another martini - - dry, very dry - -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
....I work from home....d'oh! Good thing I try to bike lots otherwise. ;)
People who cycle to work are people who:
1) Don't need to personally take care of their children in an emergency
2) Live close to work
3) Have flexible working hours and standards
4) Have a nice enough job to support an office and a place to put a bike
In short, cyclists have a lower stress life. I would argue very strongly that cycling to work is the result of a lower stress life, not the cause. It is not a lifestyle that most of us can afford for reasons that have nothing to do with cycling.
My exercise is mountain hiking two days a week. Yesterday was a nine-mile day with 2000' of elevation gain.
It's going to be 90 degrees next week. How am I supposed to bicycle to work without suffering a heat stroke? Then when I do arrive at work dripping with sweat and smelling bad, what am I supposed to do? Around here we have hills with 40 degree slopes. Good luck biking up that half mile.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
They spend billions of dollars conducting these bullshit scientific studies to prove the obvious. They would be off conducting a scientific study to find out why 98% of science is bullshit. Scientists in the olden days used to study how the body and the universe around them worked. Today they spend their time conducting meta studies to find weak and implausible correlations between things like coffee, brushing your teeth and ferret feces. They other thing they like to do is conduct survey's on what percentage of climate scientist think all climate change is caused by men.
Honestly, it takes determination and great physical fitness to cycle to work year round... it gets pretty cold and wet in the UK.
So it probably means that only the fittest people will commute by bicycle to begin with, and the most fit are the ones that can handle the longest bicycle commute and that's why they have the smallest chance of dying from cancer. SO... it's because they're the fittest, they can bike the farthest, and therefore because of their good physical health, they don't die of heart attacks as often, etc, etc not the fact that they bike to work.
If you make a guy that's got a heart issue bike 30 miles to work, I'd say that dude will screw up the "death" statistics.
They probably just proved a correlation between riding the bike to work and "less heartattacks".
This could very well be caused by the (already) healthy people choosing to ride the bike to work....
* Young architect, 32, killed after being hit by a coach while riding to work is second cyclist to die on London’s roads in 12 hours[1]
* Moira Gemmill: Lorry driver acquitted over cyclist killed in London road accident[2]
* Italian waitress, 32, killed in Battersea cycling to work at her new job[3]
* Cyclist Steve Wightwick killed in 'hit-and-run' on way to work[4]
Etc., etc., etc.
---
[1]: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2812605/young-architect-32-killed-after-being-hit-by-a-coach-while-riding-to-work-is-second-cyclist-to-die-on-londons-roads-in-12-hours/
[2]: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2812605/young-architect-32-killed-after-being-hit-by-a-coach-while-riding-to-work-is-second-cyclist-to-die-on-londons-roads-in-12-hours/
[3]: http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/italian-waitress-32-killed-in-battersea-cycling-to-work-at-her-new-job-a3378761.html
[4]: http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/cyclist-killed-in-hitandrun-on-way-to-work-a3413246.html
I remember seeing a bus crash in to a cyclist once.
The bus lost.
Turns out he was an Olympian.
Moral of the story? Don't fuck with Olympians.
While I might have gotten away with the 7 mile bike ride to work in Indianapolis on days without snow and ice, with straight roads on flat land, around here in Virginia I wouldn't have gotten beyond about 2 years on the 15 miles to work where the shortest distance road was the 2nd-most dangerous in the county. With lots of sharp crests and turns, I'd have been hit and knocked into the woods sooner or later. But by using a car, I drove those roads for 15 years and only came close to getting offed a couple times. The aforementioned 2nd-dangerous road claimed several lives and really maimed many other people over that time frame. Bikes are, at least around here, a worse choice than smoking, tantamount to choosing suicide.
Any post with "can" or "might" in it should be outlawed.
it must be great cycling to work on rainy england, with englishman driving on the wrong side of the road
amazing, how can i sit here and not be doing that, i must be crazy
... and I'm usually judged 7-12 years younger than I actually am (47). I even feel that way too. Given, I also dance a lot. But I combine my biking with PT, so that evens it out.
I offen get angry seeing avalanches of SUVs and full sized cars with only one Person in them. Germanys cities are clogged to the Brink with Cars and it's a freakin' Pita for everybody. We even start seeing the push for larger Bike Infrastructure at federal Level ... two decades or so too late imho.
Everybody I know who uses the bike as a main means of transport is a healthier happier person for it, including myself. We have too many cars. We need less better cars and caresharing at national level. And a private car limitation for cities. ... Probably even peoples sexlives.
Everything would improve.
My 2 eurocents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I don't even feel save driving to work with all the jerks on the road. Biking surely would prevent me ever getting cancer or heart disease because I'd be dead within a few days.
That seems highly unlikely. No one suffers repeated catastrophic accidents that require months of hospital care, much less over decades while continuing the same behavior.
I know motorcyclists who fit the description. I knew a guy who is a fucking father who got creamed on CA 9 by a friend who wasn't paying attention, came across the line and hit him head-on. He went right back to riding like a dipshit. He's lucky he didn't leave his son without a dad, the inconsiderate prick. Some people cannot be taught a lesson at any price. Perhaps both of these guys suffered severe brain damage in their first accident.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Being fit and healthy contributes to being fit and healthy! Well tickle my nethers I'd have never guessed!
First of all, the idea that you can reliably remove other factors from such data is bogus. The population of people who can and want to bike to work is too different from the population who can't or don't want to. There is likely massive self-selection, for example, for locations that have low pollution, for the simple reason that biking in high pollution areas is no fun.
But that's not even the major problem. Biking to work may improve your cardiovascular health and reduce your cancer risk, but it ups your risk of a fatal accident by an order of magnitude. It's likely even worse for commuters since, unlike leisure biking, when commuting by bike, you often have to use the bike even when conditions are bad.
the line is quickly blurring for what is a bicycle and what is a motorcycle.
And the statistic of emergencies is, children sentvto public schools rather than Christian private school, every problem is an emergency response.
It will only work well if there is are showers at works. You can build up a nice sweat during a vigorous cycling. And did the study take into account the possibility of increase deaths due to cycling like accidents?
if you have a large vehicle with lots of safety features (most notably the one that forces you to slow down in turns so your SUV doesn't tip over). Now, if you're in an economy car hit by one of those SUVs...
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Coincidentally, Michele Scarponi, a well-known veteran of 15 seasons in professional bicycle road racing, died today while out on a training ride, hit by a light truck that failed to yield to traffc signs. Just a few days ago, Scarponi won a stage at the Tour of the Trentino Alps and Team Astana annouced he will be their designated "ace" at the famous Giro d'Italia three-week race in May, a big suprise considering his age of 37. All that success and a few days later his twin kids are orphans.
By the way, the reason Scarponi was designated as his teams's Giro ace was the crash of his young columbian super-star teammate, who crushed kneecaps so badly as to be out of most of the 2017 season. Similarly, the young upcoming italian cycling star Fabio Aru will 99% likely miss the 100th instance of Giro, due to falling and suffering badly injured knees. Other that a light-weight plastic foam helmet (which took decades and many deaths to force it onto their heads) muscle-powered cyclists have no crash protection whatsoever, no kidney, knee, collar-bone, etc. armour or airbag, even though body airbags have been available for motorcycle riders for years. Even when they don't break a bone, sliding falls are common and the resulting "road rash" is extremely painful for weeks, as well as risky for tetanus infection.
In the words of currently reigning road racing juggernaut, Mr. Peter Sagan of Slovakia: safety has left cycling long ago... He must know, since he also crashed very badly during a cobble classic race this spring: a spectator left her wind jacket on the railing and his handlebar got entangled on it.
This could very well be caused by the (already) healthy people choosing to ride the bike to work....
Health it's something you have to maintain, no one is healthy by default and it doesn't really take much to become healthy.
There are very few people who are not fit enough to bicycle.
Isn't being on the road one of the biggest risks we take, and more so on bikes? It might actually _decrease_ overall life expectancy just from the added daily risks taken.
If I'm ever elected dictator of the world, wearing spandex and riding a bike over the age of 25 will be grounds for death by firing squad.
There's a woman in my gym, an ex-marine
Did you mean "retired marine"? Because "ex-marine" makes it sound like her discharge from the corps was less than honorable.